Appearance-based 3D gaze estimation must accommodate two conflicting needs: fine ocular detail and global facial context. Vanilla Vision Transformers (ViTs) struggle with both needs due to their fixed 16 × 16 patch grid that (i) fragments critical features like the eyes into multiple patches, and (ii) floods the self-attention mechanism with redundant information from the forehead, cheeks and background. We introduce FocusViT, a lightweight and end-to-end differentiable framework that enhances ViTs by first using a Patch Translation Module, based on SpatialTransformer Networks, to dynamically translate patches to center on content, and then employing a Perturbed Top-K operator to select only the most informative tokens for processing.

Our experiments show that combining translation and selection reduces the mean angular error (MAE) of a ViTS baseline on ETH-XGaze from 4.98◦ to 4.61◦ while using 75% fewer tokens. Furthermore, by leveraging this token reduction to enable a finer-grained, lossless 8x8 patch grid, we address a key information bottleneck in the ViT-S architecture, achieving a final MAE of 4.42◦. The framework also demonstrates consistent improvements on the MPIIFaceGaze dataset, reducing the baseline error from 5.72◦ to 5.36◦. Extensive ablation studies confirm our central finding: patch translation and token selection are complementary mechanisms that work in synergy to improve model performance.

Code generation models have become more popular recently, due to the fact that they assist developers in writing code in a more productive manner. While these large models deliver impressive performance, they require significant computational resources and memory, making them difficult to deploy and expensive to train. Additionally, their large carbon footprint raises environmental concerns. To address these challenges, there is a need to develop techniques for compressing these models while maintaining their performance.
In this work, we study the effectiveness of Group lasso pruning and post-training quantization techniques on CPUs, applied to the code generation model CodeGPT. We evaluate the performance of the compressed model using the Exact Match (EM) and Edit Similarity (ES) metrics and study the model size on disk, memory footprint, and CPU inference. In contrast with the original CodeGPT model, our solution offers a 48% relative reduction in disk size, with only a mild drop in the accuracy metrics: 8.51% absolute drop in ES and a 5.5% in EM. Using the ONNX runtime on a regular laptop, we are able to deliver a 2x inference speedup at a 32.6% reduction in size. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AISE-TUDelft/LLM4CodeCompression/tree/main/CodeGPT-on-Intel.